Attorney General Kathleen Kane's 16-month investigation into Tom Corbett's handling of the Jerry Sandusky child sex abuse investigation found no evidence to support the allegations of political influence and slow-walking she suggested as a candidate probably existed.

The report didn't even find any support of Kane's statement as a candidate that Corbett's decision to employ a grand jury slowed the case.

Instead, the report from special investigator H. Geoffrey Moulton, Jr. released this morning concludes there is "no direct evidence that electoral politics influenced any important decision made in the Sandusky investigation," and that "Attorney General Corbett never made any substantive decisions related to the conduct of the investigation."

Moulton concluded there was "no evidence" to support speculation that because of Corbett's campaign for governor at the time he was either unavailable to make decisions or that charges against Sandusky were delayed for political reasons.

The investigation also found no evidence to support speculation that the investigation was influenced by political donations from people associated with Sandusky's children's charity The Second Mile.

In addition, the report says that while the concurrent Bonusgate investigation inside the Attorney General's office at the time "exacerbated an existing shortage of investigative resources," it concludes: "the facts suggest that the early pace of the Sandusky investigation was less affected by a lack of resources than by the failure to take investigative steps that did not necessarily require additional resources."

And there's the rub.

The ultimate verdict of Moulton's report is that delays in the case are ultimately attributable to investigators failing to ask the right people the right questions soon enough.

Decisions along the way - immediately to put the case before a grand jury, to seek other corroborating evidence rather than filing charges based on just one victim, and then holding the presentment for several more months to finish tracking down leads - all "fit within the acceptable bounds of prosecutorial discretion," according to Moulton.

The problem - to the extent one existed - was not with the decision-making, but rather with the investigating.

"Different investigative choices early in the investigation might well have generated a far stronger case against Sandusky" far earlier on, according to Moulton.

Had investigators known "that the simple step of asking local police departments for imformation about Sandusky would have led to additional victims, they presumably would have taken that step far earlier," he concludes.

One of the reasons they didn't, the report indicates, is in part they misunderstood the rules of expungement of records from the state system - that any records from the earlier 1998 investigation of Sandusky would not be in the statewide central registry because by law unfounded cases must be removed.

It was the discovery of this 1998 incident that led to four additional victims and a significant expansion of the case.

The report says: "The single most productive investigative step step did not happen until the investigation was over two years old."

It adds: "While the ultimate value of that step is only fully evident in hindsight, its potential value should have been clear from the outset."

The report also examines the late date of seeking a search warrant for Sandusky's home.

While it notes that such failures are actually common in child molestation cases around the country, it says: "the failure to search Sandusky's residence earlier in the investigation is difficult to defend."

By the time investigators considered getting a warrant, senior members of the Attorney General's office were concerned the "probable cause" could be considered "stale" by the courts and therefore encouraged further investigating to find more victims.

The report indicates prosecutors were consistently concerned that their only witness was "very fragile" and would - if charges were filed - be going up against an "icon" of the Penn State football program, and that if the prosecution failed, it would severely hinder any subsequent prosecutions even if additional victims dared step forward.

The report concludes with recommendations for the future.

One of them is that the Attorney General's office should identify cases early on that merit increased scrutiny from the executive level.

Ironically, in the end, the report concludes that Corbett's sin was not paying too close attention to the Sandusky investigation, but rather perhaps that he paid too little attention.

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